Transcription
Maga communism, you know, it does provide like an attractive alternative, an attractive idea about what else can happen. I have a son who's 20, who was 24. He has never seen anything good come out of public sphere in America. So he tends to be very disillusioned and is very open to this kind of manga communism, right? Because he's seen the legislative process just be completely stymied in the stasis that we've been talking about. Any kind of redistributive policies have been shot down. The meritocracy is, you know, really in a crisis and um you have a sense of like nepotism and corruption everywhere. One feels that we need a kind of revolutionary change and this is what I would say is happening now is that we've reached a crit a crisis point where these German, you know, Marxist, the the Frankfurt school said the every kind of liberal capitalism tends towards fascism and that's what we're seeing now is that the unchecked um development of capitalism destroys democracy and liberalism and tends towards authoritarianism and fascism.
So we have authoritarianism light from the Dems and we have now this really heavy-handed authoritarianism of the right. So authoritarianism light, authoritarianism right. It doesn't seem like we can even get to a kind of um middle ground where we can have like um no authoritarianism. I used to think like, well, at least in in this kind of liberal democracy, nothing ever happens. But things have gotten so bad and they've let the um predatory capitalists, the private equity hedge fund people um go to such an extreme that I do think there's going to be some there's going to need to be some kind of popular uprising. Maybe not violent, but popular uprising.
And I have friends who are who live in the middle of the country in red America, right? to um Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, um the South, Idaho, these places. And um people are really angry and they have a lot of guns over there. They have guns. I mean, right now maybe they're still like okay with MAGA, but um they also know that they're being screwed over by p private equity and p and um hedge fund capitalism. and they know that Wall Street comes in and takes sucks every sucks the profit surplus value from their areas. And so if there is a possibility of change, it would have to be from a really progressive leftist um candidate that's emerging from the middle of the country who represents this kind of discontent and you know could create some polit peaceful political change through a kind of democratic process of elections and things like that.
But the MAGA communists are an interesting phenomenon because they as I said before like they have never seen liberal democracy work and I think that there's a lot of impatience among younger people with the kind of liberal democratic fair that they've been fed. Um the un the universities and their schools have been dominated by liberal discourse unless they went to private schools or you know religious schools and they see that the the idea of having like public debates and reason never get anywhere like the power of capital just comes in and crushes you. So why wouldn't they want to have to feel like there has to be a kind of popular sovereignty through a kind of authoritarianism? Because that's all they've kn all they've known is the stasis of the failure of liberalism and its imposition of its own ideological priorities on ordinary people. And so why they yearn for something else and maka communism you know it does provide like an attractive alternative an attractive idea about what else can happen you know among them they you know the real extreme ones are really um admiring Stalin again the positive aspect of this is that they're revisiting a period of history where um Stalin defeat defeated the Nazis and people in America have not really understood that, you know, they think like we liberated the camps. America were the heroes of World War II. Well, you know, I'm trying to I'm trying to teach this, but the Mara communists have come on their own to find this out. You know, that it was, you know, the the the tanks of German the German the Nazi tanks were like going to reach Moscow and St. Peter or Leningrad at that point and it was on the plains of Ukraine that the tanks produced by the factories that Stalin built in the Ukraine area were able to fight them off. And if Stalin hadn't done heavy reindustrialization of the Soviet Union at the time, they would not have been able to push back the um the Nazi army, the national the German army.
So um that that period of history Americans are not taught we are we're not taught that because after 1947 was declared Soviet Union enemy of the world everyone you know communism just creates victims and we forgot that we were allies and so um there's a kind of revisiting of that period of history and you can see that part of it is also because they just don't trust the way that history is taught anymore and we we've been taught you I've been taught since I was little like communists are full of propaganda. We have the truth. And then suddenly this generation is like waking up like no no this is not the way the world's supposed to work and I'm finding out all the stuff on my own. Sometimes on the internet, sometimes it's wrong. But disinformation is part of the official information. So um there's also just a lot of crazy conspiracy theories. But the internet has found a way of um providing you know this this kind of macommunism a kind of life.
Now what we thinking Trump is really executing this kind of like imperial monarchical executive power which is reflective of you know what the monk communists are about too like if you have power you should exercise it. This is what Obama never wanted to do. you know, everyone was like compromising, creating all these like illegalistic obstacles because he profoundly did not want change. He was happy and satisfied with the status quo. So we go back to this old Marxist idea of how ideological formations for him was the bourgeoisi for us it might be the professional managerial class. Ideological formations prevent any imagination of change.
I grew up in a world where I saw the last of the real public works that created um that was creating a kind of middle class utopia in America. Right? That was the 1970s. In my public school, teachers were proud to be public school teachers. They felt they had a lot of freedom in the classroom. They were paid well. The classrooms we had provided, you know, musical instruments, art instruments. My family were very, you know, they were just aspiring middle class, but they they would not have provided any kind of arts or cultural education for me because they would have to pay. But the school provided all of this stuff. Now I live in a wealthy suburb and all we did when when my son was in school was get asked to contribute for money to the school for arts and culture because it everything had been cut down to the bone and everything has to be private.
So what we're actually seeing is an intensification of the privatization of the American economy under Trump with these tariffs because there is no public um move for rebuilding of infrastructure of reinvestment in the de-industrialized areas. It's like, oh, I'm going to put these tariffs on and then like private companies are going to come and save our asses. They're going to build a billion dollar um factory there, another billion dollar factory here. You know, the American worker is not prepared for this new world either. You have to have apprenticeship training. You have to tell people that it's great to be a a uh factory worker. Again, there's um there are all these surveys about how Republicans believe that we need, you know, manufacturing is good to a smaller degree. Democrats are they're like yes ma American manufacturing good and then you ask them would you want to work in a factory and like only 25% of the people say they want to work in a factory 60% of people say American manufacturing good but only 25% of people say it's actually good to work in a factory so you know here's a huge change in the country that has to be t undertaken through apprenticeship programs through train federal jobs programs. I don't know. You need to spend money.